Lumina Cigarette Tipping: A Stylish New Safety Feature

Image courtesy of Tannpapier GmbH, a subsidiary of Trierenberg Holdings

Lumina Cigarette Tipping: A Stylish New Safety Feature

Tannpapier headquarters in Traun, Austria

Cigarette manufacturers are always looking for effective ways to protect their products against counterfeiting. Innovative Austrian company TANNPAPIER’s ingenious “Lumina Tipping” technology not only achieves that, but as an added bonus even helps to bolster brand identity and image.

By Thomas Schmid

Located in the picturesque small Austrian town of Traun just a few kilometers south of Linz, TANNPAPIER GmbH – part of the TANN Group – has since many years been at the forefront of innovative cigarette paper, tipping, and packaging solutions for the tobacco industry. Whether it’s clear closure labels, hot-stamped tipping papers, or even tear tapes with embedded QR codes, the company’s r&d department never seems to run out of creative ideas, and that is a good thing. Cigarette manufacturers are grateful for any new feature that helps make their brands more counterfeit-proof.

“We are regularly being asked by cigarette manufacturers whether we can offer superior security features as anti-counterfeiting measures,” technical service manager Michael Lindner told Tobacco Asia. “We can. And our focus is on smart safety items, which we can realize on tipping paper, inner liners, or tear tape.” And as if to prove his point, he added that TANNPAPIER had just recently introduced a sensational new product that touches on the boundaries of what is technically possible.

Lumina Cigarette Tipping: A Stylish New Safety Feature

Enter fluorescent printing – but on tipping paper! Coined “Lumina Tipping” by the company, the term describes the process of applying fluorescent printing on actual tipping paper, using special inks. The defining gimmick is that any elements printed in that way are completely invisible in normal daylight, but become visible as soon as the object – in this case the cigarette tip – is exposed to a UV light source.

Colloquially called “black lights”, such light sources are often deployed in nightclubs, at fairs, and open-air events. Even electric fly traps (mosquito lights) frequently used by entertainment venues, garden restaurants, and also in private homes would trigger the peculiar “glow-in-the-dark” effect, because their insect luring component likewise is a UV light tube.

Image courtesy of Tannpapier GmbH, a subsidiary of Trierenberg Holdings

Lumina Cigarette Tipping: A Stylish New Safety Feature

Michael Lindner, Tannpapier’s technical service manager

Challenging Production Helps Deter Counterfeiters

UV printing on outer cigarette packaging has of course already been around for ages and is quite easy to achieve. It’s nothing to write home about, really. So why would Lumina Tipping be so noteworthy, so novel? Well, the devil lies in the details, the actual technical execution as well as legislative requirements.

“On tipping paper only food-grade inks are permitted because they come into direct contact with a person’s mouth,” said Lindner. “In fact, the inks we use on tipping paper are subject to even stricter regulations than those used in the food industry.” Secondly, he said, the application of any ink, including UV-active ink, is extremely difficult to achieve on delicate tipping paper. “It is very challenging to apply lumina printing reliably on tipping paper as the material experiences enormously high mechanical and thermal stresses during cigarette production.” If not done with expertise and the right machinery, tipping paper can easily tear, the UV-active print elements can smudge, or the fluorescent effect can simply disappear altogether due to a thermally induced chemical degradation that may occur during the printing process.

But What About the Ink?

All these factors, Lindner asserted, make Lumina Tipping another excellent safety feature to protect branded cigarettes against counterfeiting. Even if pirates should attempt fluorescent printing on tipping paper, they are likely to fail if they do not possess the state-of-the-art, thus prohibitively expensive, machinery required.

But how about the UV inks themselves? Wouldn’t counterfeiters who are already engaged in a criminal activity anyway care less whether they deployed potentially toxic inks instead of safe food-grade inks? “This is a valid point,” admitted Lindner, “and it is well known that counterfeiters are not concerned about the safety, purity, and toxicological properties of the tobacco blend, the cigarette paper, filter, tipping base paper, and the applied printing inks. I can imagine that in fake tobacco products none of the components would ever pass any official regulatory or sensory testing.”

But then he once again hinted at the extraordinarily complex and technically difficult printing process involved. If counterfeiters cannot reliably produce fluorescent printing on tipping paper with their often rather rudimentary machines, they most probably won’t bother. It’s a convincing argument, compounded even more by the fact that high-quality food-grade UV-active inks are hard to source for outsiders as the suppliers are very limited.

An Inexpensive but Effective New Safety Tool

Yet when executed by an experienced company like TANNPAPIER, the solution is quite inexpensive and therefore suitable for all cigarette brands across all retail price brackets that need additional counterfeiting protection. Lumina Tipping also is a simple but effective and creative tool that can merge branding and anti-counterfeiting purposes. After all, customers decide what elements they wish to have invisibly printed on their product’s tips: brand messages, brand name, logo, or even only a decorative pattern; The options are quite unlimited.

According to Lindner, TANNPAPIER has already demonstrated and offered the innovative product to most of its customers and has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from international cigarette manufacturers with regards to Lumina Tipping’s regulatory, toxicological and sensory aspects. “Although we are still in the marketing phase, Lumina Tipping is nevertheless absolutely ready for commercial release and we are convinced that the first commercial test runs conducted by our interested customers will not be very far off.”